The death penalty is among the most controversial subjects in the United States. It’s legal in most states, but in the last several years several states have abolished capital punishment, and worldwide the number of countries where capital punishment is no longer either legal or practiced has grown dramatically over the last three decades. With this month marking the 75th anniversary of the last public execution in the United States, Britannica senior editor Brian Duignan posed several questions on the state of the death penalty to Deborah Denno, Arthur A. McGivney Professor of Law at Fordham University in New York and a contributor to Encyclopaedia Britannica on lethal injection, the gas chamber, and electrocution. Her books include Biology and Violence: From Birth to Adulthood and Changing Law’s Mind: How Neuroscience Can Help Us Punish Criminals More Fairly and Effectively, forthcoming from Oxford University Press,on neuroscience and its implication for fair punishment for criminals. Her answer to one of those questions, on whether executions should be televised, was so in depth that we have published it separately here.

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Britannica: In a 2008 case, Baze v. Rees, the U.S. Supreme Court held that execution by lethal injection did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, because the risk that the prisoner would experience excruciating suffering through a botched procedure was not “substantial” or “objectively intolerable.” How might a botched lethal injection lead to excruciating suffering for the prisoner? How often have lethal injections been botched?

Denno: A botched lethal injection could lead to a prisoner’s torment in a number of ways, most of which are now being challenged in court because Baze — a highly splintered and ineffective ruling concerning only one state (Kentucky) — has never quelled lethal injection litigation. Indeed, less than two months after Baze was decided, lawyers once again started challenging the three-drug protocol that the Baze Court condoned because of the concern I discussed in Question 1 – that the prisoner would receive an insufficient dose of the anesthetic sodium thiopental and therefore would be conscious and aware but paralyzed and tortured when injected by pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. Since Baze, other developments have compounded the risks for prisoner suffering. These range from states switching to entirely untested single-drug protocols using sodium thiopental only to prison officials now scrambling for sodium thiopental seemingly anywhere they can find it due to its halted production by Hospira, Inc., the drug’s sole manufacturer. Indeed, the shortage of sodium thiopental has led prisons officials in a quick dash to purchase the drug from questionable sources throughout the world (from England to Pakistan) – thereby enabling a situation in which prisoners could be injected by drugs that may be impure, expired, or unsafe and thus ineffective for making inmates unconscious during execution. Most recently states have searched for sodium thiopental substitutes such as pentobarbital – which had never been used for human execution purposes – once again prompting cries that prisons are using death row inmates as “human guineas pigs” subject to continuous execution experiments.

Lethal injection drugs are just one of a number of factors that could heighten a prisoner’s risk for an agonizing lethal injection. Others include unqualified executioners, the absence of medical experts, vague and ill defined injection protocols, and physiologically-challenged inmates with drug-using histories who are unfit for injection. The compendium of these problems have led to some of the worse botched executions we’ve ever seen – inmates showing the emotions and marks of hours-long needling and cut downs of the groin, arms, and legs along with excessive bleeding, coughing, and choking. While there are glaringly obvious debacles like Romell Broom’s 2009 attempted execution (see Question 1), an equally troubling concern is that lethal injection executions are being botched without our detection. Therefore, an accurate counting of botches is nearly impossible. For example, in 2006, evidence in California suggested that, of the eleven inmates lethally injected in that state, six may have been conscious and tortured by the three-drug regimen, a statistic acquired only by retrospective expert investigation and not by execution witnesses or the media. Whether or not California’s greater-than-fifty-percent botched execution ratio is representative of other states will probably never be known. Regardless, if California, which houses the largest death row population, reports such results, that’s a statistic worth responding to.

Britannica: Earlier this year the state of Texas announced that it would replace one of the three drugs used in lethal injections, the anesthetic sodium thiopental (which is no longer being manufactured), with pentobarbital, a barbiturate used to euthanize animals. Other states have since begun using pentobarbital in their lethal-injection protocols. How will this development affect the reliability (or riskiness) of lethal injection in the future?

Denno: I think the decision of some death penalty states to switch from sodium thiopental to pentobarbital will significantly impair the reliability of lethal injection in the future for several reasons. First, pentobarbital has proven to be a more controversial drug than sodium thiopental which, for better or worse, has been part of lethal injection executions from the very start (since 1982). Pentobarbital, on the other hand, had never been used in a lethal injection execution until this year and its tested effects as an anesthesia that can safely induce unconsciousness in prisoners are far less known. While some experts have contended that pentobarbital is comparable to sodium thiopental, pentobarbital has already contributed to at least one botched execution – that of Roy Blankenship in Georgia– which spurred that state’s decision to videotape Andrew Grant DeYoung’s July 2011 execution (as discussed in Question 1). Indeed, with a three-drug protocol like Georgia’s, which includes the pancuronium bromide that paralyzes prisoners, the potentially torturous flaws of pentobarbital, like those of thiopental, may never be seen by executioners or witnesses alike. Second, because pentobarbital does not share sodium thiopental’s history of use in lethal injections, it is a generally riskier prospect regardless of which side one takes concerning pentobarbital’s effectiveness. No one has handled it for the purposes of causing death and the calibrations or guidelines for measuring it are unknown. Third, Lundbeck, Inc., the maker of pentobarbital, has avidly worked to prohibit the drug’s use in executions by contacting governors and prison officials to warn them about pentobarbital’s risks in executions. As the president of Lundbeck, Inc. wrote to Florida’s governor recently, the company was “adamantly opposed” to the pentobarbital’s inclusion in Florida’s lethal injection procedure because it defied everything Lundbeck was about with respect to providing wellness for their clients. Combined with Hopira Inc.’s decision to cease its production of thiopental entirely for essentially the same reasons, the fight over lethal injection drugs has now spurred two drug manufacturers to take extreme measures to chastise the death penalty policies of major execution states. Fourth, at the time of Baze v. Rees in 2008, all states incorporated sodium thiopental into their three-drug protocols. With such continuous protocol shifting among states since then, however, there are now four different methods of lethal injection, depending on whether states use three drugs or just one, and whether states use sodium thiopental or pentobarbital. This kind of division and instability in lethal injection drug regimens, which has never existed before, suggests that prison officials are not confident about their choices. Fifth, all of these developments suggest that states may try to bring other drugs into the lethal injection mix, thereby fueling the existing degree of risk and unreliability with lethal injection. Such a trend would make the faltering procedure of lethal injection even more hazardous than ever, at which point one could question why we keep it.

Britannica: John Paul Stevens’s concurring opinion in Baze was notable for his announcement that he no longer considered the death penalty constitutional, in part because of its discriminatory application. How serious is the problem of racial discrimination in capital cases?

Denno: Racial discrimination in capital cases is a very serious problem. While blacks comprise only 12 percent of the US population, they constitute 34% of all executions and 41% of the death row population. One of the most startling and enduring death penalty predictors is whether a black defendant is convicted of murdering a white victim, a key racial combination revealed by Iowa Law School professor David Baldus and his colleagues. In 1983, Baldus conducted a large and sophisticated statistical study of racial discrimination in Georgia which showed that, while controlling for other important factors, the likelihood of defendants receiving the death penalty was 4.3 times greater if they were convicted of killing white victims than if they were convicted of killing black victims. This statistic, along with other such biases, was examined in McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), one of the US Supreme Court’s most controversial death penalty decisions because the Court held that Baldus’ results did not show “a constitutionally significant risk of racial bias” in Georgia’s death penalty system. Yet, Justice Lewis Powell who wrote the majority opinion later said that his regretted his decision, a highly unusual pronouncement for a Justice to make.

Indeed, Baldus’ victim-effect finding was, and continues to be, replicated many times over in other states and at different times along with other detections of racial bias. That was certainly my experience when I worked with a team of researchers examining all homicide cases in New Jersey directly after the state’s reimposition of capital punishment in 1982. While our team’s large study also showed many elements of bias, one pattern was clear: homicide defendants were far more likely to be prosecuted and convicted of capital murder as well as to be sentenced to death if they were poor and black and their victim was white (especially if the victim was white and middle class).

Recent materials compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center show that while murder victims are nearly equally divided between blacks and whites, 80% of those executed since 1976 were involved in murders with white victims. In addition, more than 20 percent of executed black defendants were convicted by all-white juries, a finding in line with some evidence indicating that prosecutors have an incentive to exclude (presumably empathic) black jurors. Blacks are also substantially underrepresented among key actors in the criminal justice system, such as district attorneys, who often make the primary decision to bring a death penalty charge. In light of these and other findings, some states have tried to rectify the inequity. For example,North Carolina passed the Racial Justice Act, which allows defendants to challenge the death penalty using statistical studies showing racial bias. Yet North Carolina’s efforts are currently under attack and only Kentucky has a similar (albeit more limited) law. As I said at the start of my response to this question, racial discrimination in capital cases is a very serious problem and, unfortunately, there appears to be no real end in sight.

Britannica: In 2007 New Jersey abolished capital punishment, becoming the first state to do so since the death penalty was restored in 1976. Since then, New Mexico and Illinois have also eliminated capital punishment. Given that the general public is still broadly supportive of the death penalty, what accounts for these cases, and are we likely to see further states move in this direction in the coming years?

Denno: The general public is still broadly supportive of the death penalty but the punishment’s popularity has declined appreciably. Whether because of disturbing discoveries of innocence among death row inmates, lack of efficacy, racial disparities, botched executions, or high costs, the courts and the public have shown more skepticism of the capital punishment process in the twenty-first century than they have since the early 1970s. According to the Death Penalty Information Center’s 2010 report on a national poll of 1,500 registered voters, respondents now favor alternatives to the death penalty compared to prior years. In total, 61% of respondents would choose, over the death penalty for murder, another form of punishment including life with no possibility of parole and restitution to the victim’s family (39%), life with no possibility of parole (13%), or life with the possibility of parole (9%). Likewise, the death penalty no longer has the high priority among voters that it once did. When those in death penalty states were asked if it would make a difference in their vote if a representative supported repeal of the death penalty, a total of 62% stated that it would make no difference (38%) or they would be more inclined to vote for that representative (24%).

Not surprisingly, a majority (68%) of respondents stated that the costs associated with the death penalty were “a very or somewhat convincing argument” reason to oppose it given that a range of other needs were more important — emergency services, jobs, police and crime prevention, educational and public health care services, and even roads and transportation. Respondents also had concerns about the death penalty itself – the punishment’s unfair and arbitrary application, the imposition on families of victims due to the long appeals process, and the risks of executing innocent prisoners. Among Latino and Catholic respondents, there was strong moral and religious opposition to the death penalty.

All of these results and others point to increasingly diminished public support of the death penalty and the likelihood that additional states will move in the direction of abolition. Beginning in 2009, for example, a number of states (e.g., Maryland, Colorado, Connecticut, Montana, and Kansas) considered legislation to repeal the death penalty and the current trend seems to be in that direction. A 2011 poll of 800 California voters, for instance, showed that 63% favored commuting the sentences of all of California’s death row inmates to life in prison without the possibility of parole along with restitution to the victims’ families – a move that would save the state $ 1 billion over the next five years and enable such money to go toward public education and law enforcement. Given that the number of death sentences per year in the US has shown a precipitous decline since 1999, and that substantial numbers of “death penalty states” are that in name only (having not executed anyone in years), more state abolition seems clearly in the cards.